A local website likes to post photos and have people guess what they're about.

Today it was a woman who looked shock. It turned out to be a NY'er reacting to news of JFK's death. In the explanation that followed the photo, there are a couple of taped interviews made on that day. I think you will find the second one very interesting. People on the street believe that the assassination may be due to the hate that was being spread in literature, particularly in the south. Does that familiar to anyone? Maybe update it from literature to television? Now does that ring a bell?

1. One of my professors at UT said she was a grad student when JFK was shot.

She was in California, but was from Texas, and she in the cafeteria telling the other students that JFK shouldn't go to Texas, that he didn't understand the anger there, that he was risking his life. They were telling her she was paranoid when someone ran into the cafeteria and screamed that he'd been shot.

Watch the clip of him smirking when he's leaving the courthouse. He was thrilled with the attention, and with what he had done. He was proud of himself. Just like John Wilkes Booth, he thought he would be seen as a hero, at least by the people who mattered to him. He had a God complex, changing the world with a single shot.

But the anger he heard around him helped convince him that people wanted him to do it, that everyone, or the ones that mattered to him, also hated Kennedy, and he would be a hero for taking care of it. A God needs his worship, and that anger was the sacrifice that fed him.

Oswald was a violent, angry psychopath who beat and raped his wife and tried to kill General Edwin Walker only a few months before; the evidence points to it having been his rifle (an easy shot from that distance for a qualified marksman) and also to it having been him pulling the trigger. The various conspiracy theories neither accord with the available evidence, nor are they plausible (JFK was killed by right-wing anti-Castro Cubans/the Mafia/the CIA/on orders from Lyndon Johnson because he was going to pull out of Vietnam, et cetera ad infinitum).

15. Your surprised that there are people who believe something else? The proof is in

Edited on Wed Aug-11-10 10:57 PM by peacetalksforall

the documents and science. Always has been - always will be - with more to come.

Children who were taught to look both ways and don't talk to strangers tend to think for themselves.

And in this country we have a mother lode of knowledge, decisions, directions, that prove that there is a sub-government that plots, kills, steals, and lies with ease. Who depend on followers who believe them. It's been five plus decades in the contiumn.

Be comfortable in your beliefs and the space your in. The rest of us are not in that place and are not comfortable.

Not one bit of it. The forensics, the science, the documents... It's all conclusive. Oswald was the shooter. Looking both ways before crossing the street doesn't prove otherwise.

There are sub-governments, and private companies that function as governments, and they plot and steal and kill, and there were people who were connected to these clandestine groups who benefited greatly from Kennedy's death. Some probably wanted him dead. Some may have even plotted to have him killed. But Oswald killed him. The bullets, the trajectories, the witnesses, the video tape, the geography, the physical evidence... they are incontrovertible. Oswald did it.

Now I wouldn't be stunned to learn others knew he was going to, or even hired him to do it. I doubt it--it just doesn't fit his personality, but it wouldn't surprise me. You can't prove a negative, so you can't prove someone else wasn't involved. Ralph Yarborough used to say he was certain Oswald was the lone gunman, but when asked if he thought someone put Oswald up to it, he always refused to answer. If there's a conspiracy that's where it is. If there's a conspiracy, then someone hired Oswald to do the shooting, or at least knew about it. But Oswald was the lone shooter.

Aside from me being a (former) historian, I don't think it really fits a pattern. I believe some conspiracies, I reject others, and most I just suspend judgment on until I see evidence either way. Some of my beliefs and ideals get labeled as radically leftist, others as centrist. I tend to judge each thing on its own, rather than forging beliefs based on labels others have created, and I let others worry about where those beliefs fit. So I don't know what positions it fits.

17. Our government would seal the record for tomato soup just because it was red.

Since Oswald had been a Marine, had lived in Russia, and had worked with Cuban groups, I'm sure it was impossible to investigate him without uncovering a secret they had to hide here and there.

One of those secrets was latter revealed. There was a couple who were friends with high ranking Soviets who spied for us on their frequent visits. They happened to be with these friends when Kennedy was shot, and witnessed first hand the reaction of the Soviets, which proved that they, at least, weren't involved. That record was sealed for decades so the couple wouldn't be outed.

11. I also have been hesitant to reply due to worries about sending this to the 'dungeon"

I wasn't there ; I don't know what happened. These people in these interviews below WERE there. Regular folks with no political or "conspiracy' axe to grind. Just happened to be there; working in the railyards etc. There are many more like them who saw and heard what they did. Many of those interviews have disappeared from you tube recently. I just posted these two as examples. There are, again, plenty more people who have basically the same recollections as these two men, and were also interviewed and filmed .. Somehow, the Warren commission chose not to include their stories in the official government account of the events of 11-22-63...That's all I know...Some of them, including Mr. Bowers, met with awfully convenient fatal "accidents' not too much later, much like all the suspicious "suicides", plane crashes, etc of people that were inconveniences to Dick Cheney and the PNAC crowd.

9. I used to believe all the conspiracy stuff. I poured over it, because I was going to be the one

who figured out which was true. I categorized everything into possible, impossible, necessary, and theory (I was a history grad student, so that's what I always did. Still do.). I lived in Dallas, so I walked around Dealy Plaza, trying to prove he couldn't have made the shot, trying to find the exact angle where the shots on the Knoll had to have come from. "Back and to the left," and all that.

I proved it couldn't have come from anywhere but the SBD. I proved that every witness first reported shots coming from that direction. I proved that not one bit of evidence proved that Oswald couldn't have done it, despite the claims about magic bullets (it traveled in a straight line) or pristine bullets (it wasn't) or lead fragments in Connally being too much for the pristine bullet to account for (again, proven wrong). I looked at where the shot would have had to come from to make Kennedy's head snap back if it was just the force of the bullet that caused the snap (answer--it would have had to pass through the windshield without breaking it).

I saw nothing any of the conspiracies came up with that was necessary evidence--in other words, none of it proved that someone else had to have done it, and most if didn't even prove what the supporters claimed it did.

I then got a job with someone who was in the motorcade that day--Ralph Yarborough. He wouldn't talk about it, but I read his statements and talked to people who knew him. He had no doubt where the shots came from, how many there were, or who fired them.

I still read nonsense "proving" it couldn't have been Oswald. One recent example--Richard Belzer wrote an article saying it was impossible because a cop had seen him in a break room drinking a Coke mere seconds after the shots, and he couldn't have made it down that fast. So I looked up the cop's testimony (again). It was quite detailed. He heard the first shot and slowed down, trying to see where it came from. He could tell it was one of the buildings in front of him--he was on Main facing the SBD. He saw birds flying between the two buildings, but couldn't tell which building they had been disturbed from. After the third shot, he was slowed or stopped, and then he sprang into action. He drove the block or so to the building, rode up on the sidewalk. He climbed the stairs and scanned the area, noticing another cop driving up on the Grassy Knoll and talking to people. All the people were pointing up at the SBD. He went inside and met the building supervisor, and they identified themselves to each other. They crossed to the elevators on the other side of the building. They pressed the buttons, and waited, but the elevators were on the top floor (which itself is interesting, since at least one of them should have parked on the ground floor). They then crossed back to the stairs and started climbing. At the second floor, the cop looked through the doorway window and stopped. He saw a man walking rapidly away from the door. He called to the supervisor, who had not stopped, then went through the door and ordered the man (Oswald) to stop. Oswald stopped, and slowly turned around. Notice, he was in the hallway according to the cop Belzer cited as evidence, not in the break room. The cop said he hands were empty, not holding a Coke. The cop had his gun drawn, and pointed it at the man--cops don't point guns at people unless they are about to use them or are afraid of genuine danger, so that alone should tell you the cop sensed something; maybe Oswald's "Psycho" smirk scared him. The supervisor caught up, identified Oswald as safe, and the cop went on up the stairs. Oswald was next seen by the back door security gate--think about that, a political junkie and activist not interested in the fact that the president he hated had been blown away outside his front door--leaving the building with a Coke in his hand (that's where Stone got the Coke from--the cop didn't see Oswald in the break room, he saw him just inside the second floor stairway door, walking away).

The cop estimated it took about 90 seconds from the last shot until he saw Oswald. That seems short to me, but okay, go with that. When I read Belzer's essay, I was living on the fourth floor, so I grabbed a watch and walked--not ran--down to the ground. These were taller floors than the SBD, too. Took me less than fifteen seconds. Oswald was younger and in better shape than me.

That Belzer article was typical. The facts were wrong, the assumptions weren't logically necessary, and the actual facts proved that the assumptions were wrong. That's what i saw in every conspiracy theory. When a claim was wrong, it was one made by the CTers. When an argument was illogical, it was made by the CTers. They sound more like Fundamentalists trying to prove to me that the Bible is true by citing the Bible, than like historians or scientist. You show them scientific facts, like the true computer-calculated route of the "Magic Bullet" or the end picture of the badly-damaged "Pristine Bullet" or the ballistics tests showing how much lead the bullet lost, or anything, and they either laugh significantly at your naivete for trusting science, or they just repeat the point you've refuted as though it gains in factual accuracy with each retelling (as it seems to in their minds).

So I went from a believer, to agnostic, to an atheist. Oswald shot Kennedy. The verifiable evidence is 100% conclusive, and none of the evidence showing something else is factually based. The deeply-flawed Warren Commission, the HSCOA report, and every serious study that analysis the actual evidence instead of making up shit (like claiming Oswald's gun couldn't be fired that fast--I saw one guy on video claiming it was impossible to even cycle the gun through three rounds in six seconds, and as he was saying this he demonstrated with the same model gun and did it in less time than that) concludes that Oswald fired all three shots, that no one else fired any shots that hit the president or left any other evidence, and that if there was a conspiracy, it didn't involve the government, the Mafia, Cuba, or Russia (the caveats there are because the HSCOA was a bit odd, in that it claimed there was audio evidence of a fourth shot, but still said it didn't hit anything and that Oswald fired the shots the killed the president and wounded Connally, and that there was no grand conspiracy--and of course the audio evidence of the fourth shot was later debunked, anyway).

So, Oswald shot Kennedy. If there was anyone else involved with Oswald (and I doubt it, because he was too much of an ass to work with anyone else), they were minor players and they have escaped because everyone was so busy trying to make sure Kennedy's murderer was cleared of his crime that no one really considered the possibility that someone hired Oswald to do it. In fact, if I ever assassinate someone (and I never will) I will hire someone to do it, then start a thousand conspiracy theories arguing that that person couldn't have done it, and that way anyone who didn't buy the official story would be so busy looking in the wrong direction they'd never look at me.

3. I've watched that Chet Huntley clip on several occasions and saw , even then, the obsession with

Edited on Wed Aug-11-10 05:38 PM by abq e streeter

that "both sides do it" false equivalency regarding hate, and violence-encouraging speech. Huntley was a giant among journalists and this is not a personal criticism of him, but it was striking , near the end of his reflections, how he talks about the violent consequences of that type of thing that we hear so much now from hate radio, Fox "news" etc. but even back then, as happens now, the MSM feels this obligation to say that "both sides do it" as Huntley does, and once again, then as now, no examples of the left "doing it too" are given...because of course, they don't exist. Now or then.

back in those days Dallas had a bad reputation as being chock full of batshit crazy people like snake oil evangelists, white supremacists, birchers, and also rich oil barons who were fiscally conservative and hated Kennedy.

Powered by DCForum+ Version 1.1 Copyright 1997-2002 DCScripts.com
Software has been extensively modified by the DU administrators

Important Notices: By participating on this discussion
board, visitors agree to abide by the rules outlined on our Rules
page. Messages posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums are the
opinions of the individuals who post them, and do not necessarily represent
the opinions of Democratic Underground, LLC.